


Interlude in E Major

by LNJames



Series: Suddenly Everything Has Changed [9]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-27
Updated: 2018-12-27
Packaged: 2019-09-28 07:50:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17178824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LNJames/pseuds/LNJames
Summary: Everyone else pales.





	Interlude in E Major

_You summon_

The Luthor summer estate was as sprawling as it was contained. Twenty acres of vineyard and brambles all wildly attached to steep coastal land that crashed into a rocky desolate beach of their own. The “cottage’ was far from anything quaint, a nine room white stucco affair with drafty rooms and secrets. There were outbuildings for vinting and landscaping, a stable that once held horses, and quarters for estate staff who were expected to find other accommodations when the Luthors arrived so as not to disturb their retreats. Lionel Luthor’s great grandfather had acquired the land during the gold rush days and had built an empire on the back of sturdy rock full of natural resources. Twenty acres surrounded the cottage while miles around them were preserved from development through shrewd mineral rights negotiations and land trust agreements with county and state officials. It wasn’t desolate, but it was a far cry from Metropolis and their shining mansion on the hill. Even back then, the Luthors knew how to keep their privacy.

During the summer of her fifteenth year, Lena Luthor took a vow of secrecy. She was already adept at keeping things to herself and being her own counsel, but events of that summer vacation made her cautious and hopeful and full of wonder in a way that felt like she should protect it. She had spent most of her youth fact-finding and learning and absorbing the world around her in books that could not scheme or betray. Science was easy, it never lied or tried to hide the truth, it just waited for someone to ask the right questions. This was why she packed every book she treasured and brought it in the big black Luthor Suburban. Holding the things she secretly loved close was the only way she knew how to keep them from getting lost. Lillian scoffed at the weight of her luggage and Lex just smiled a goofy grin and ruffled her hair as if she were still his pet child, his favorite.

Now, as she took off across the property, summer scrub bushes scratched at her legs while she wound her way through rows of vines full of tiny green promises. The house had become too full despite its size. Lionel and Lillian were hosting friends for a few days, business acquaintances from a social set that started the morning with champagne and never stopped. Lena didn’t have anything against John and Linda Graves, per se, and she had tried to be as nice as she could to their son Otis whose obvious, socially awkward interest in Lena made her uncomfortable. But it was the conspiratorial, cunning nature of their daughter, Mercy, and her immediate effect on Lex that made Lena excuse herself as best she could and flee. A house full of Luthors and Graves with liberal trips to the homestead wine cellar was enough to drive Lena outside and away. It was always better to be alone than play the game her family expected. She was not above behaving like a sullen teen if it got Lionel to dismiss her with a head shake and a smile.

As she stood on the rangy cliff overlooking the Pacific and the isolated beach many steep steps below, she knew that the only way to solve a mystery was to put it to the test. Lena was on a mission to confirm a theory about a person or persons unknown. Golden girls did not just appear and disappear in Lena Luthor’s world without reason.

**

Midvale was a sleepy beach town tucked into the hills along the coast and it was a place where summer days and nights passed slowly. The Danvers house was big enough and small enough to feel like home even when it wasn’t really, yet. Or it could be a home if Kara could figure out how to exist in the space of walls and carpet and wood nestled in trees and grass and rocks and water. It was also very, very quiet and the sky was a color her eyes were still getting used to seeing. Argo City on Krypton had been sulphurous and red and hazy, bustling machines in the air shadowed in a dying Argonian atmosphere. The noises of her world had been electronic and sonic and muffled by so much crystalline structures keeping the poison out. The quiet of Krypton wasn’t so much quiet as it was falsely muted silence and artificially without sound. While Earth was a loud place full of life and it took Kara years to master how she experienced sound, the nights in Midvale were quiet enough to help. She could still hear the wind as it blew through coastal trees, she could still hear waves breaking on rocky shores, she could still hear night creatures foraging, Kara could still hear everything she wanted, she could hear this planet living. It was a far cry from all that time spent in absolute, eternal silence in the Phantom Zone.

The summer of her sixteenth earth birthday was one of change and no one could tell her how or what that meant. Kara watched others for clues, classmates, Alex, anyone who could explain how her body changed and how her feelings manifested themselves on Earth, but humans were not always the best examples. She of course knew she was different, that her alien biology was something of great interest to the Danvers and to others enough so to hide it. How could she hide how her body responded without her control? Lead-lined glasses and practice and boundaries and restrictions on what she did and how became as much a prison as a home and Kara did her best. Or she tried to do her best. But her best wasn’t quite what fit here. So instead, Kara looked to the stars and hoped it would make sense, that she would make sense one day.

Alex had stormed through the house earlier, grumbling about being bored and stuck without the car now that Eliza did adjunct summer teaching at MCC. Nothing could contain her restlessness and discontent and blame after Jeremiah died and Kara knew enough to stay out of her way. She knew what loss could do to someone and nothing she said helped and nothing she did mattered. There were some times when it was better to go away than to stay and so Kara had jumped from the roof into the night sky and finally felt at home. She could fly in the dark with no one noticing, she didn’t stand out because Kara felt invisible for once. And even though Kenny Li caught her last year in a photograph, she wondered if that would be the last time someone truly looked for her, who actually saw her for what and who she was because they wanted to find her. In the air high above Midvale zooming over land curving along the coast of a black ocean, Kara was free and alive and herself.

If she had known what she was looking for, she likely never would have noticed and if she hadn’t shut out the sound of the wind rushing in her ears, Kara probably never would have heard. But as the moon pulled the tide and lit up the waves beneath her, Kara saw something in the darkness that stood out and shouted into the night sky.

**

Sometimes Lena wondered if her family ever noticed whether she was missing for any length of time. She tried it once, back at the Luthor mansion, when she ‘camped’ out in the far back corner of the garden under her thatched bramble hideaway. She had planned it for months, meticulously hiding away things she thought she might need, studying the weather maps for the right conditions, her water supply stocked with stolen rinsed bottles from the house. She was sure she had thought of everything, what she would take and what she would leave behind if she really did need to run away. She was ten. No one noticed she was gone for two days and two nights. She slept fitfully, waking every few hours to track the constellations and tell time in scratches in the dirt. She ate nearly all of her food by the first day and a half. It only sprinkled on her once, but she had plenty of water and her five favorite books sealed in plastic and the resolve of a minor in possession of a strong will. When she returned during Sunday breakfast, Lillian asked her to set her own plate on the table like nothing had happened. Lex gave her a sly grin, having sent her coded messages through their walkie talkies, and Lionel read the Wall Street Journal in silence. At least she knew whether she was missed or whether anyone would come looking for her.

Now, as darkness folded around her, she stood on an outcropping of rocks cut off from the beach by high tides, and she wished she were missed. It wasn’t that she was afraid to die, she wouldn’t. She was a strong swimmer and the moon would move the ocean back into place eventually. The stars were clear and bright, it was warm, and there were no storms on the horizon. It was just her surrounded by water frothing and churning and reminding her of its immensity. Lena Luthor felt singular; the world was full of mysteries and this was her chance to test her theory.

“Wake up…”

When she said these words the first time, it was too quiet to hear above the waves around her feet. No one emerged from the ocean, no miracle appeared, nothing happened. With a breath, Lena scrambled higher on the rocks closer to the sky, her bare knees scraping and her shoes searching for purchase on the slippery rocks. Her black t-shirt and shorts were getting damp from the spray and her hair had come loose from its knot on top of her head. She reached up and pulled dark wet strands from her face and kept climbing. There was nothing holding her back, no one judging her form, no harsh words sliding into her ear and into her head about what she was doing or why. She was fifteen and had been on her own far longer than most, even with a family. High white tendrils of clouds wisped across the moon and water rushed around her. In the distance, surge of waves a quarter mile away on the shore broke like far off promises. Lena felt completely and unequivocally alone and herself, full of her own power and determination and curious mind. When she reached the top of the rock formation that had been washing away little by little with each millenia, Lena found herself smiling. She was happy and alive and it was time to test that feeling.

“Wake up!!”

With an exultant yell, Lena put her hand in the air and turned her face to the sky. It was a call to action and a request to the universe and to herself. Any answer would do.

**

Her memories of Krypton were mainly fragments now, some wholecloth, some pieces, some only sensory. Kara once thought she smelled the Dar-Essa that her grandmother gave her when she was deep in the woods behind the Danvers house. She could recite the songs she had sung to Kal-El when he was a baby. Images of her father’s office, the color of her mother’s eyes. The acrid smoke that seeped into her pod, the visions of a planet in violent repose before the very end. Sometimes she thought she was lucky in the Phantom Zone when she no longer remembered that she was alive. Other times, it was torture, pure and simple. Even now, even after the earth years she had been here, Kara sometimes wondered if this was all a dream and she was still stuck in that timeless quiet space. Did she really land on a distant planet where Kal-El had grown up strong without her? Had each of the days that passed here just been an endless moment in space that her mind conjured to keep herself from going crazy? To give her hope?

If this were a dream, then it was hard to ignore the call she heard high above an endless ocean. If this were a dream, she might as well take a trade wind down and sluice through the air on wings she didn’t own. Kara Zor-El may not fit very well on earth, but in her dreams, she was weightless and free and heeding a call in the dark of night in a life that was now hers to define as best she could. The Danvers were so kind, but what Kara needed wasn’t anything they could give. What Kara needed was a way out of the Phantom Zone and out of this dream so she could hold on to something real that was hers and hers alone.

_Wake up!_

A voice broke through and Kara’s ears heard it and then her eyes saw an outline in the darkness a mile away. It was real enough, it sounded like a fragment, a thread she could grasp that was outside of herself, something to help her believe that she existed when everything she had known was lost. With a hard turn, Kara felt the air whip her hair in front of her face before she shook it out, just in time to see a figure with arm raised high right before that dark figure slipped, right before the bottom fell out and a body was falling. Kara’s heart stopped before it started again, pumped full of golden red power, her ribs on fire as she flew faster than she ever had before. Her hands sparked electric as they reached out and caught a body in free fall, the rocky edge of the ocean about to take whatever fell into its darkness. Her senses were a blur as Kara skidded to a stop on the beach far from the outcropping, her knees taking the brunt of the landing as she came in too fast and her arms carried what they could hold and more.

For a moment, everything was dark, everything was quiet.

Kara gently let her precious package go and with it, not Dar-Essa but a hint of jasmine clung to her arms. The girl she now realized she held rolled onto her back in the sand and looked up at her, breathing heavy from the fall and the near miss. Kara knelt back and puffed out a breath, her heart racing enough that it pounded loudly in her ears. The girl, her earth age or a little less, wild black hair and green eyes stared at her, mouth parting in astonishment. So quiet Kara barely heard it, the girl spoke in human words even when Kara's head translated them into Kryptonian.

“It’s..you…”

And Kara panicked because she had been seen, she had been caught, she had revealed herself in the real world and not in the dream world and there would be trouble. It was hard enough for Kara to come to terms with who she was that the thought of someone else knowing was too much, too soon, too overwhelming. She had learned that she had a secret and her secret was dangerous. The girl reached out before Kara could jump away and she felt fingers touch her own hand, atoms sparking against her skin and her cheeks burned and her alien, alien body settled briefly before Kara looked into the girl’s eyes. If this were a dream, she wasn’t sure how to wake up from it and the only way up was out and the only way out was through the air that she sprang into like a flash of gold into the night. Kara put as much distance between her and something she could never have and wished the wind could peel off a memory so vivid and so real that it would haunt her far into the future.

This story just began.


End file.
